Coding in schools: A is for algorithm | The Economist

The Economist does a nice job of capturing succinctly the history of teaching computing in schools, the explosion of interest worldwide, and the greatest challenges to making it work.

Above all, the new subject will require teachers who know what they are doing. Only a few places take this seriously: Israel has about 1,000 trained computer-science teachers, and Bavaria more than 700. Mathematics and computer-science graduates generally choose more lucrative trades; the humanities and social-science graduates who will find themselves teaching coding will need plenty of support. Britain is skimping: it is introducing its new curriculum in a rush, and preparing teachers has mostly been left to industry groups such as Computing at School, which helped put together the syllabus. If coding is to take its rightful place in the classroom, it cannot be done on the cheap.

Call me biased, but Computing At School is not an industry group. I can’t speak for CAS more broadly but CAS Scotland was founded by teachers who were dissatisfied with the situation they found themselves in. We had too many competing pressures and a lack of clarity on the scope and purpose of computing education. We ended up with too much focus on applications and not enough care on the underlying principles.